Joe Biden’s allies defend president as Democrats reel from DoJ report

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Joe Biden’s Democratic allies rallied around him on Friday after they were left reeling by a special counsel’s report that cast the US president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

Lawmakers depicted the 81-year-old president as the best candidate to lead the Democrats into November’s election, despite long-simmering doubts in some quarters of the party about his mental acuity and whether he should step aside.

“I am absolutely confident based on [Biden’s] incredible record of success for the country, that he is the right person to lead the country for another four years,” Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic senator from Maryland, told reporters.

“[Donald] Trump is going on 78. And the president is 81-years-old. Is that meaningful? Of course not, it’s the same. They are older folks, and they’re our choices,” said Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman.

“It comes back to the very core choice that we have as a nation,” Fetterman added. “Do we want order over chaos? Do we want the truth over lying? Do we want virtue over just corruption and sleaze?”

Speaking at the White House on Friday, Vice-President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor, called the special counsel’s comments about Biden’s memory “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate”.

Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, said the report’s description of Biden’s memory “does not live in reality”.

But other Democrats warned of the lasting political impact of the report by Robert Hur, a former federal prosecutor and registered Republican who oversaw an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified materials at his private residences and offices.

Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior Obama adviser, said he feared the special counsel’s descriptions of Biden’s memory would “break through to the public at large”.

Hur’s report said that in interviews with his office, Biden had forgotten significant dates, including when he had served as Barack Obama’s vice-president and when his eldest son Beau had died from cancer.

The special counsel opted not to press charges, arguing that at any trial, Biden would “likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

The report was immediately leapt upon by the Trump campaign. “It is a very low bar to be ruled mentally fit for trial,” said Stephen Miller, a former White House Trump adviser, told Fox News.

“That very low bar . . . the president of the US does not meet.”

Pfeiffer wrote in a newsletter on Friday that Biden now had to “repeatedly demonstrate that Hur is wrong and that he is up to the job . . . which means doing more interviews and more press conferences.”

Biden has shied away from such events during his presidency. He declined an invitation to be interviewed on CBS News this weekend for a spot that would have aired alongside the Super Bowl, a primetime event likely to reach more than 100mn Americans.

“Privately, many Democrats will continue to worry that [Biden’s age] is going to become an increasingly difficult issue as the campaign goes on,” said Kevin Madden, an adviser to former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney now at the Penta Group consultancy.

Madden added that “the challenge for the Biden campaign and the White House is that every time they attempt to address [the issue of age] they sort of reinforce it.”

An NBC News poll published this week, but conducted before Hur’s report was released, found three-quarters of American voters, including half of Democrats, say they have concerns about Biden’s mental and physical health.

“My memory is fine,” Biden declared at a hastily arranged press conference Thursday night that grew increasingly hostile as reporters shouted questions about his age and mental acuity.

But, minutes later, he referred to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the leader of Mexico in response to a reporter’s question about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It was the latest in a series of public mis-steps in which the US president has mixed up foreign leaders.

Speaking last weekend at an event in Nevada, Biden confused François Mitterrand, the president of France who died in 1996, with the current president Emmanuel Macron.

At two separate fundraisers in New York on Wednesday, Biden referred to the late German chancellor Helmut Kohl when referring to former German chancellor Angela Merkel.